Nothing is free, so here are my brief ideas for funding this:
- Ads
- "premium features" for sellers
- "promoted" sellers
- Fees for those that want to be "Secure Escrow and Dispute Resolution" accounts
- Ads
- "premium features" for sellers
- "promoted" sellers
- Fees for those that want to be "Secure Escrow and Dispute Resolution" accounts
They founded a company, OB1, with a $1 million venture capital investment from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [...] OB1 received a second round of investment for $3 million in the fall of 2016.
OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious. Their website http://ob1.io/ includes a couple of hints as to how profits may be eventually sought: a search engine for Open Bazaar and a cloud based Open Bazaar store launching service. Then there is the fact a small cabal have probably premined all the easily obtainable coins (SYSPOOL, Give Me Coins, F2Pool), which means if the value goes up they profit handsomely.
Note that http://ob1.io/about.html lists some more investors: BlueYard Capital, Digital Currency Group and William Mougayar.
I'm not sure that's the case here, but "no obvious way to make money" isn't exclusionary when it comes to the VC funding model.
It's an open source, decentralised, peer-to-peer system. As long as the peers want to keep using it, they can keep using it.
Anybody who is interested can maintain it. If it has a large number of people actively using it to conduct business on a daily basis, somebody will maintain it. If it's big enough that lack of maintenance would be a problem, it won't be a problem.
For an early Bitcoin whale, a few million is negligible for a product that could bring crypto to the masses and dramatically increase the value of their crypto investment portfolio.
https://mubiz.com = another search engine, very small French company
OB1 has a plan for monetization (I'm a co-founder!) but OpenBazaar itself is designed as a neutral trade protocol and network that doesn't rely on OB1 at all, other than the majority of developer power is provided by the company at the moment.
Question a) How would you define that point, when investors want to sell their shares, regarding open bazaars development, number of users, annual turnover and market share?
Question b) How could the network generate those returns but by fees or some sort of future "Exit"?
Question c) What is your investors answer to the question "how big could it become?" (please don´t say "next amazon" - I am sure they would buy in before and close it down...)